Tuesday, September 30, 2008

At Last


This is the first chance I've had to update the blog, so you may have guessed that B the G has arrived by now.  And she has.  

Weighing in at a healthy 6.8 lbs., she was put into my arms on Sunday, September 21, 2008, looking a bit stunned, but peaceful.  For all of the drama and trauma of my pregnancy, labor and delivery was remarkably straightforward.  Practically textbook.

Justin and I attended a local street fair on Saturday, with Elvis impersonators and men in drag on stilts, funnel cake and local art, both good and bad for sale,.  I was absolutely exhausted when I got home, but figured it may have moved things along a bit.  Sure enough that night around 7:00 pm I went into labor.  At first mild and manageable, by midnight, contractions were 3-4 minutes apart and had me on my knees.  

By the time we got to the hospital I was doing the panting and moaning act that you see in TV.  Sure now that I wanted that epidural, we were triaged in, I was told I was 4-5 centimeters dilated and to wait for anesthesia.  Sweet, sweet relief when that spinal hit and I could suddenly look around and feel the reality of knowing I was about to deliver a baby.  The drugs did slow down my dilation a bit, so I labored awhile until they decided to give me some pitocin to speed up my dilation.  Up down, up down.  

Around 10:30 a nurse checked me, told me she could see the head and asked me if I was ready to celebrate a birthday.  The rush of it when she said that...the imminence of my whole journey was right there in front of me.  I pushed for about 25 minutes under the nurse's rather drill sergeant like command.  The touchy-feely stuff goes out the window when they are trying to get that baby out.  But I was glad she was pushy.  Take-charge demeanor in a crisis is very comforting to me.  Especially when I have no idea what I'm doing.

11:09 and she was out, pushed into the world by brute strength, willpower, and her own determination.  Justin cut the cord and went over to look at her.  I was shaking with the effort and emotion, tears just pouring down my face as I stretched to get a look at her in the cleanup tank.  And then she was in my arms, outside of me, looking at us.  She has a head full of black hair and looks like a little Natalie Portman in the V for Vendetta phase.  She is tiny and pink and perfect.  

 

Friday, September 19, 2008

Passing the baton...


My grandma died yesterday.  I had hoped she would live to see her great-grandaughter, even if she might not have been too sure about who she was and where she fit into the family tree.  But she was 99 and tired.  I am selfishly sad because I will miss her terribly.  And also blessedly happy because she was ready to die as she and I discussed so many times.  Yesterday was also my father's birthday who was her only child and who looked after her like Florence Nightingale in his home until her death.  Death was always just out of her reach and I like to think that at the end she did have some control and timing over her departure after all, choosing to be alone with my dad on his birthday.  

She always used to wonder out loud why she was living so long and for awhile I had wonderful, easy answers for her.  "You have to teach me to crochet.  You have to attend my wedding.  you need to meet your great-grandchildren."  Then, as she got older the answers got harder.  Her eyesight and hearing got worse, her mobility decreased, her memory shortened, and I came up with lamer and lamer answers like "you have to finish this crossword puzzle" or "you need to have dinner with me."  Until finally for the last year or so, she would ask me the question again, and I was forced to say "I don't know, Grandma."  Because I really didn't.

99 is a lot of years.  I put myself to sleep last night making a chronological list of all of the things she had witnessed in her lifetime.  There's the usual old person list: several wars, the advent of cars, the Depression, man on the moon, computers and the internet.  But I also thought of trivial things - tissues in a box, polyester, credit cards, ball point pens, tampons.  So many things that changed and then changed again while she grew up, grew out, grew old.  

It is easiest for me when remembering people, to use my sense of smell.  My Grandma never wore fragrance at all but the smell of Pond's cold cream makes me feel like she's standing next  to me.  She also used to make this divine beef soup whenever we would visit her in Pennsylvania.  One of those quintessential grandmother soups that take all day to do right and that nobody has the time to make anymore.  She would stir that soup all say, skimming fat off the top, adding vegetables and herbs.  When we arrived at her house, the smell was intoxicating.  She kept the noodles separate in a blue bowl, boiled and ready to spoon in to the broth.  I always wondered why they were separate.  Did they get overcooked if she added them later?  Did someone along the line prefer no noodles and it became habit to serve them separately?  I'll never know because I never asked.

Brown butter, too.  What is it with eastern Europeans and brown butter?  My grandparents put it on everything.  It's such a unique, evocative smell for me, but it's richness was an acquired taste.  Not until I was older did I learn to love the flavor of it drizzled over the handmade potato pierogi my grandma made.   One of us always left her house with a case of the runs and we were all usually 5 lbs. heavier.  But man, they were good.

So, I'll look for her dark eyes in the face of my daughter.  Ochi chyornye, like my grandfather used to sing.  And hope that maybe Grandma brushed past her on her way out and my daughter's way in. Rubbing off a gift or two, like in the fairy tale.  Her easy, contagious laugh,  her fierce desire to constantly be learning despite her 6th grade education, or her love of music and singing.  The circle of  it humbles me as I think of her in labor with my dad 66 years ago yesterday, pacing and worrying about his birth.  And here I am, my due date has come and almost gone, but I am just as heavy with my child all these years later, just as anticipatory, just as scared.  

I am forced to be patient for the little life inside me to find her way out in her own time, as my Grandma was forced to be patient in laying down her own burden of such a long life, long after she was tired of carrying it.  I am so glad she is gone, I only wish I could have been there to tell her she was dying while it was happening.  It sounds macabre and heartless, but I know her well enough, that she would have been so happy to hear the news.  Relieved and happy.  But maybe she already knew.

Monday, September 15, 2008

Low Rider

Ok, almost a full 10 months pregnant.  Friday is D-day at 40 weeks and she really can't get much lower without falling out.  

I have an overwhelming urge to clean the blades on the ceiling fans, not to mention the fridge, the dog, the car and the washing machine.  Yes, I cleaned the washing machine.  The dog was harder.  

I took the car to the local fire department and got a lovely fireman to help me install the car seat properly today.  He had just completed a four day seminar on car seat safety and installation, so I feel pretty confident that it's in there correctly.  Can you imagine a four day seminar on child seat safety?  I should bring him some doughnuts or something.  What do firemen eat?

B the G is still grooving around on a regular basis in there, although it feels different now because she is lower and her movements lately seem less...punchy for lack of a better word.  Maybe she's gearing up too, steering towards the mental focus and balance of  T'ai Chi rather than the physical Taekwondo she'd been practicing in the past.  

I'm feeling good.  Calm and strangely confident now.  Justin is still battling his back pain and my mother fell and broke her foot in two places, so her visit is out.  Hopefully my sister will still make it at some point, but I can do this.  I am excited and watchful and present at the moment.  It's very dream-like.  I don't think it will be too much longer.






Monday, September 8, 2008

Ode To A Panty

Oh blessed, life-changing, granny panties
Why didn't I buy you 10 lbs ago?
Goodbye vanity and red squinch lines
Hello sexless, stretchy comfort waistband.

Tuesday, September 2, 2008

Perspective

Since Justin's back is still not right and he is on painkillers, I had to drive him to get his hair cut this weekend.  He was starting to look a little simian, especially in the back, but I was still rather grumbly about having to chauffeur because the chairs there aren't very comfortable and my bladder now seems to be the size of a pea.

Justin's barber's name is Eli and he has an old school barber shop in midtown Atlanta, complete with striped pole and red leather barber chair.  He looks a lot like Mr. Magoo and speaks with a heavy Greek accent.  There was no on else in the shop that day so I was grateful we'd get in and get out. 

I sat opposite the red leather chair and the three of us exchanged pleasantries about the holiday weekend, time spent with family, etc.  He told us he has family in Tampa and spoke enthusiastically about spending time in Tarpon Springs, a Greek community near Tampa.  I asked if his children spoke Greek and he said "Little bit.  Not like me.  I speak seven languages."  People who are multi-lingual may as well possess a super power as far as I'm concerned and I'm always intrigued about how they learned, when in life, what were the languages.  Seven languages!  "How did you come to know seven languages?"  And he said "I was a prisoner for two years in the death camps in Europe."

Eli speaks Greek, Polish, Russian, Italian, French, English and German.  And then while he is snipping serenely around my husband's head, he started telling me the story of how he came to be in those death camps at 16 years old.   He was taken prisoner when Germany invaded Greece in 1941.  I always wondered how the Nazi's knew who was Jewish and who wasn't when they sent people to camps and asked Eli about it now.  He said when the Nazis arrived in a town they would build scaffolding and hang people from ten random families and tell the crowd that if they lied about their status they would be next on the scaffold.  I guess that was a pretty effective method.  He also said there was no mention of concentration camps or gas chambers.  Prisoners didn't know where they were going only that they were being taken away.  He said if people knew the journey by cattle car led to death by gas chamber, there probably would have been a lot more people running for it, or at least resisting.  For the time being, he wore the gold star they gave him and crowded onto the train with his two brothers.

He went on to tell me from that point forward, he was moved around between 8 different concentration camps.  He lost his older brother to sickness at one of them and was separated from his younger brother early on.  They worked digging ditches and unloading bags of cement from trains.  He said the Nazis starved them right from the get go and food became a preoccupation.  He learned to count the people in line to the barrels of soup and time it so that he got a ladleful from the bottom, where the potatoes were.  Although sometimes he did get it wrong and they switched out the barrels while he was still in line, giving him the thin, watery broth from the top.  He also learned which dumpster was used for the  officers mess and stole food from it repeatedly, carefully waiting for the searchlight to pass before doing his thieving.  He said he got caught only once and received 25 lashes on his bottom.  I felt hunger just listening to his stories, how you are so starved you will do just about anything for food.

Sometimes the soldiers would come to the prisoners for certain skills they had a need for.  Who is a mason?  Who knows electricity?  They came once and asked for a barber and Eli volunteered his services.  They took him to a small office where the Kommandant was waiting.  The man was completely bald and wanted his head and face shaved.  Eli picked up the straight razor to begin work and as soon as he did an officer cocked a gun and kept it trained on him during the entire process.  He did nick the Kommandant during the process and had nothing but some hair and soap to stop the blood.  When Eli finished, the Kommandant looked in a little mirror, wrote something on a bit of paper and handed it to Eli.  Sure he was carrying his death sentence for the nick, Eli opened it and found a coupon for some bread and cheese at the mess hall.  He thought he had found his gravy train, but that officer was transferred later in the week.

Five times, Eli said he stood in line to enter the gas chambers and five times something happened that stopped the process, a miracle, he called it, and he lived to see another day.  All this time I am sitting across from the chair, leaning forward into his story and asking questions, shaking my head, dumbstruck at the magnitude of it.  I know it is also millions of other's story who have survived the Holocaust, but I've never talked to a survivor before, and he was so open about sharing this personal, terrifying experience.   

Liberated with his younger brother who he was reunited with at another camp, he described the American planes flying overhead, while he was being loaded into another cattle car, this one open at the top so the planes could see the people piled inside.  "Les Americains! Les Americains sont ici, maintenant!" he yelled, imitating the joy, the relief, the exuberance they felt knowing the end of the war was imminent.  I was almost in tears myself at this point and Justin's hair was finished.

Eli lost a twin sister, and five other siblings to the camps.  His hometown of 200,000 was wiped out with only 200 survivors left at the end of the war.  He showed us pictures of his late wife, his son and daughter, his grandchildren.  His face is so happy and proud and I think he feels like the luckiest man in the world.  "Bring the baby back" he said pointing to my belly and he pulled out a blue plastic rocking horse.  "For customers and kids" he winks at me.  He thanked us again and again for the company and tried to give us the haircut on the house.  I was ready to stuff the money in his pants if he didn't take it.

My worries and problems feel ridiculous when we leave his shop.  Our biggest concern is whether we should buy a wagon or a sedan.  I can't stop thinking about Eli all day, or the next.  Where does one get that kind of triumphant attitude after all of that horror?  How does it destroy some and not others?  He said some prisoners would just throw themselves at the electric fence, unable to take the wretchedness their lives had become.  Their bodies would be left to remain there for a few days, hands gripping the wires even after death.  

I hope I am made of the same stuff as Eli and more than that, I hope B the G is too.  She has already proved herself a little fighter and we still have a big journey ahead of us. I feel so much wiser after listening to Eli's story and I can't really put my finger on what it is I've learned.  I feel calmer and more determined to enjoy every minute I have, though I know that feeling will fade or be forgotten.   In the end, I only know that I witnessed a little slice of strength and the real power of the human spirit, visiting with him that day.  I will add it to the other little nuggets of wisdom and stories and experiences I have collected and tell it all to B the G one day.